University of Virginia Library

THE CHEROKEE'S THREAT.

There were a hundred students in the new class
matriculated at Yale College in Connecticut, in the
year 18—. They were young men of different ages
and of all conditions in life, but less various in their
mien and breeding than in the characteristics of the
widely-separate states from which they came. It is
not thought extraordinary in Europe that the French
and English, the German, and the Italian, should possess
distinct national traits: yet one American is supposed
to be like every other, though the two between
whom the comparison is drawn were born and bred as
far apart, and in as different latitudes, as the Highland
cateran and the brigand of Calabria.

I looked around me with some interest, when, on
the first morning of the term, the president, professors,
and students of the university assembled in the college
chapel at the sound of the prayer-bell, and, with my
brother freshmen, I stood in the side aisle, closing
up with our motley, and, as yet, unclassical heads and
habiliments, the long files of the more initiated classes.
The berry-brown tan of the sun of Georgia, unblanched
by study, was still dark and deep on the cheek of one;
the look of command, breathing through the indolent
attitude, betrayed, in another, the young Carolinian
and slave-master; a coat of green, garnished with fur
and bright buttons, and shaped less by the tailor than
by the Herculean and expansive frame over which it
was strained, had a taste of Kentucky in its complexion;
the white skin and red or sandy hair, cold expression,
stiff black coat, and serious attention to the
service, told of the puritan son of New Hampshire or
Vermont; and, perked up in his well-fitted coat, the
exquisite of the class, stood the slight and metropolitan
New-Yorker, with a firm belief in his tailor and himself
written on his effeminate lip, and an occasional
look at his neighbors' coats and shoulders, that might
have been construed into wonder upon what western
river or mountain dwelt the builders of such coats and
men!

Rather annoyed at last by the glances of one or two
seniors, who were amusing themselves with my simple
gaze of curiosity, I turned my attention to my more
immediate neighborhood. A youth with close, curling,
brown hair, rather under-size, but with a certain
decision and nerve in his lip which struck me immediately,
and which seemed to express somehow a confidence
in himself which his limbs scarce bore out,
stood with his back to the pulpit, and, with his foot on
the seat and his elbow on his knee, seemed to have
fallen at once into the habit of the place, and to be
beyond surprise or interest. As it was the custom of
the college to take places at prayers and recitation
alphabetically, and he was likely to be my neighbor
in chapel and hall for the next four years, I speculated
rather more than I should else have done on his face
and manner; and as the president came to his Amen,
I came to the conclusion, that whatever might be Mr.
“S.'s” capacity for friendship, his ill-will would be
very demonstrative and uncomfortable.

The term went on, the politics of the little republic
fermented, and as first appearances wore away, or
peculiarities wore off by collision or developed by intimacy,
the different members of the class rose or fell
in the general estimation, and the graduation of talent
and spirit became more just and definite. The
“Southerners and Northerners,” as they are called,
soon discovered, like the classes that had gone before
them, that they had no qualities in common, and, of
the secret societies which exist among the students in
that university, joined each that of his own compatriots.
The Carolinian or Georgian, who had passed his
life on a plantation, secluded from the society of his
equals, soon found out the value of his chivalrous deportment
and graceful indolence in the gay society for
which the town is remarkable; while the Vermontese,
or White-Mountaineer, “made unfashionably,” and ill
at ease on a carpet, took another line of ambition, and
sat down with the advantage of constitutional patience

and perseverance to the study which he would find in
the end a “better continuer,” even in the race for a
lady's favor.

It was the only republic I have ever known—that
class of freshmen. It was a fair arena; and neither
in politics, nor society, nor literature, nor love, nor religion,
have I, in much searching through the world,
found the same fair play or good feeling. Talk of our
own republic!—its society is the very core and gall of
the worst growth of aristocracy. Talk of the republic
of letters!—the two graves by the pyramid of Caius
Cestius laugh it to scorn. Of love!—of religion.
What is bought and sold like that which has the name
of the first? What is made a snare and a tool by the
designing like the last? But here—with a government
over us ever kindly and paternal, no favor shown,
and no privilege denied; every equality in the competitors
at all possible—age, previous education, and,
above all, worldly position—it was an arena in which
a generous spirit would wrestle with an abandon of
heart and limb he might never know in the world
again. Every individual rising or falling by the estimation
he exacts of his fellows, there is no such
school of honor; each, of the many palms of scholarship,
from the severest to the lightest, aiming at that
which best suits his genius, and as welcome as another
to the goal, there is no apology for the laggard. Of
the feelings that stir the heart in our youth—of the
few, the very few, which have no recoil, and leave no
repentance—this leaping from the starting-post of
mind—this first spread of the encouraged wing in the
free heaven of thought and knowledge—is recorded in
my own slender experience as the most joyous and
the most unmingled. He who has soiled his bright
honor with the tools of political ambition—he who has
leant his soul upon the charity of a sect in religion—
he who has loved, hoped, and trusted, in the greater
arena of life and manhood—must look back on days
like these as the broken-winged eagle to the sky—as
the Indian's subdued horse to the prairie.

2. II.

New Haven is not alone the seat of a university.
It is a kind of metropolis of education. The excessive
beauty of the town, with its embowered streets and
sunny gardens, the refinement of its society, its central
position and accessibility, and the facilities for attending
the lectures of the college professors, render
it a most desirable place of instruction in every department.
Among others, the female schools of the
place have a great reputation, and this, which in Europe,
or with a European state of society, would
probably be an evil, is, from the simple and frank
character of manners in America, a mutual and decided
advantage. The daughters of the first families
of the country are sent here, committed for two, three,
and four years, to the exclusive care of the head of
the establishment, and (as one of the privileges and
advantages of the school) associating freely with the
general society of the town, the male part, of course,
composed principally of students. A more easy and
liberal intercourse exists in no society in the world,
and in no society that I have ever seen is the tone of
morals and manners so high and unexceptionable.
Attachments are often formed, and little harm is
thought of it; and unless it is a very strong case of
disparity or objection, no obstacle is thrown in the
way of the common intercourse between lovers; and
the lady returns to her family, and the gentleman
senior disappears with his degree, and they meet and
marry—if they like. If they do not, the lady stands
as well in the matrimonial market as ever, and the
gentleman (unlike his horse) is not damaged by having
been on his knees.

Like “Le Noir Fainéant,” at the tournament, my
friend St. John seemed more a looker-on than an actor
in the various pursuits of the university. A sudden
interference in a quarrel, in which a brother freshman
was contending against odds, enlightened the class as
to his spirit and personal strength; he acquitted himself
at recitations with the air of self-contempt for
such easy excellence; he dressed plainly, but with
instinctive taste; and at the end of the first term,
having shrunk from all intimacy, and lived alone with
his books and a kind of trapper's dog he had brought
with him from the west, he had acquired an ascendency
in the opinion of the class for which no one
could well account, but to which every one unhesitatingly
assented.

We returned after our first short vacation, and of
my hundred class-mates there was but one whom I
much cared to meet again. St. John had passed the
vacation in his rooms, and my evident pleasure at
meeting him, for the first time, seemed to open his
heart to me. He invited me to breakfast with him.
By favor seldom granted to a freshman, he had a lodging
in the town—the rest of the class being compelled
to live with a chum in the college buildings. I found
his rooms—(I was the first of the class who had entered
them)—more luxuriously furnished than I had
expected from the simplicity of his appearance, but
his books, not many, but select, and (what is in America
an expensive luxury) in the best English editions and
superbly bound, excited most my envy and surprise.
How he should have acquired tastes of such ultra-civilization
in the forests of the west was a mystery
that remained to be solved.

3. III.

At the extremity of a green lane in the outer skirt
of the fashionable suburb of New Haven stood a rambling
old Dutch house, built probably when the cattle
of Mynheer grazed over the present site of the town.
It was a wilderness of irregular rooms, of no describable
shape in its exterior, and from its southern balcony,
to use an expressive Gallicism, “gave upon the bay.”
Long Island sound, the great highway from the northern
Atlantic to New York, weltered in alternate lead
and silver (oftener like the brighter metal, for the climate
is divine), between the curving lip of the bay and
the interminable and sandy shore of the island some
six leagues distant; the procession of ships and steamers
stole past with an imperceptible progress; the
ceaseless bells of the college chapel came deadened
through the trees from behind, and (the day being one
of golden autumn, and myself and St. John waiting
while black Agatha answered the door-bell) the sun-steeped
precipice of East Rock, with its tiara of blood-red
maples flushing like a Turk's banner in the light,
drew from us both a truant wish for a ramble and a
holyday. I shall have more to say anon of the foliage
of an American October: but just now, while I remember
it, I wish to record a belief of my own, that if, as
philosophy supposes, we have lived other lives—if

it is surely in the days tempered like the one I am remembering
and describing—profoundly serene, sunny
as the top of Olympus, heavenly pure, holy, and more
invigorating and intoxicating than luxurious or balmy;
the sort of air that the visiting angels might have
brought with them to the tent of Abraham—it is on
such days, I would record, that my own memory steps
back over the dim threshold of life (so it seems to me),
and on such days only. It is worth the translation of
our youth and our household gods to a sunnier land,
if it were alone for those immortal revelations.

In a few minutes from this time were assembled in

Mrs. Ilfrington's drawing-room the six or seven young
ladies of my more particular acquaintance among her
pupils, of whom one was a newcomer, and the object
of my mingled curiosity and admiration. It was the
one day of the week when morning visiters were admitted,
and I was there, in compliance with an unexpected
request from my friend, to present him to the
agreeable circle of Mrs. Ilfrington. As an habitué in
her family, this excellent lady had taken occasion to
introduce to me, a week or two before, the newcomer
of whom I have spoken above—a departure from the
ordinary rule of the establishment, which I felt to be
a compliment, and which gave me, I presumed, a tacit
claim to mix myself up in that young lady's destiny
as deeply as I should find agreeable. The newcomer
was the daughter of an Indian chief, and her name
was Nunu.

The wrongs of civilization to the noble aborigines
of America are a subject of much poetical feeling in
the United States, and will ultimately become the poetry
of the nation. At present the sentiment takes
occasionally a tangible shape, and the transmission of
the daughter of a Cherokee chief to New Haven, to
be educated at the expense of the government, and of
several young men of the same high birth to different
colleges, will be recorded among the evidences in history
that we did not plough the bones of their fathers
into our fields without some feelings of compunction.
Nunu had come to the seaboard under the charge of a
female missionary, whose pupil she had been in one
of the native schools of the west, and was destined,
though a chief's daughter, to return as a teacher to
her tribe when she should have mastered some of
the higher accomplishments of her sex. She was an
apt scholar, but her settled melancholy, when away
from her books, had determined Mrs. Ilfrington to try
the effect of a little society upon her, and hence my
privilege to ask for her appearance in the drawing-room.

As we strolled down in the alternate shade and sunshine
of the road, I had been a little piqued at the want
of interest, and the manner of course, with which St.
John had received my animated descriptions of the
personal beauty of the Cherokee.

“I have hunted with the tribe,” was his only answer,
“and know their features.”

“But she is not like them,” I replied, with a tone
of some impatience; “she is the beau ideal of a red
skin, but it is with the softened features of an Arab or
an Egyptian. She is more willowy than erect, and
has no higher cheek-bones than the plaster Venus in
your chambers. If it were not for the lambent fire in
her eye, you might take her, in the sculptured pose
of her attitudes, for an immortal bronze of Cleopatra.
I tell you she is divine.”

St. John called to his dog, and we turned along
the green bank above the beach, with Mrs. Ilfrington's
house in view, and so opens a new chapter in my story.

4. IV.

In the united pictures of Paul Veronese and Raphael,
steeped as their colors seem to have been in the
divinest age of Venetian and Roman female beauty, I
have scarcely found so many lovely women, of so different
models and so perfect, as were assembled during
my sophomore year under the roof of Mrs. Ilfrington.
They went about in their evening walks, graceful and
angelic, but, like the virgin pearls of the sea, they
poured the light of their loveliness on the vegetating
oysters about them, and no diver of fashion had
yet taught them their value. Ignorant myself in those
days of the scale of beauty, their features are enamelled
in my memory, and I have tried insensibly by
that standard (and found wanting) of every court in
Europe the dames most worshipped and highest born.
Queen of the Sicilies, loveliest in your own realm of
sunshine and passion! Pale and transparent princess
—pearl of the court of Florence—than whom the creations
on the immortal walls of the Pitti less discipline
our eye for the shapes of heaven! Gipsy of the Pactolus!
Jewess of the Thracian Gallipolis! Bright
and gifted cynosure of the aristocracy of England!—
ye are five women I have seen in as many years' wandering
over the world, lived to gaze upon, and live to
remember and admire—a constellation, I almost believe,
that has absorbed all the intensest light of the
beauty of a hemisphere—yet, with your pictures colored
to life in my memory, and the pride of rank and
state thrown over most of you like an elevating charm,
I go back to the school of Mrs. Ilfrington, and (smile
if you will!) they were as lovely, and stately, and as
worthy of the worship of the world.

I introduced St. John to the young ladies as they
came in. Having never seen him, except in the presence
of men, I was a little curious to know whether
his singular aplomb would serve him as well with the
other sex, of which I was aware he had had a very
slender experience. My attention was distracted at
the moment of mentioning his name to a lovely little
Georgian (with eyes full of the liquid sunshine of the
south), by a sudden bark of joy from the dog, who had
been left in the hall; and as the door opened, and the
slight and graceful Indian girl entered the room, the
usually unsocial animal sprang bounding in, lavishing
caresses on her, and seemingly wild with the delight
of a recognition.

In the confusion of taking the dog from the room, I
had again lost the moment of remarking St. John's
manner, and on the entrance of Mrs. Ilfrington, Nunu
was sitting calmly by the piano, and my friend was
talking in a quiet undertone with the passionate Georgian.

“I must apologize for my dog,” said St. John, bowing
gracefully to the mistress of the house; “he was
bred by Indians, and the sight of a Cherokee reminded
him of happier days—as it did his master.”

Nunu turned her eyes quickly upon him, but immediately
resumed her apparent deep study of the abstruse
figures in the Kidderminster carpet.

“You are well arrived, young gentlemen,” said Mrs.
Ilfrington; “we press you into our service for a botanical
ramble. Mr. Slingsby is at leisure, and will be
delighted, I am sure. Shall I say as much for you,
Mr. St. John?”

St. John bowed, and the ladies left the room for
their bonnets—Mrs. Ilfrington last. The door was
scarcely closed when Nunu reappeared, and checking
herself with a sudden feeling at the first step over the
threshold, stood gazing at St. John, evidently under
very powerful emotion.

“Nunu!” he said, smiling slowly and unwillingly,
and holding out his hand with the air of one who forgives
an offence.

She sprang upon his bosom with the bound of a
leveret, and between her fast kisses broke the endearing
epithets of her native tongue, in words that I only
understood by their passionate and thrilling accent.
The language of the heart is universal.

The fair scholars came in one after another, and we
were soon on our way through the green fields to the
flowery mountain-side of East Rock; Mrs. Ilfrington's
arm and conversation having fallen to my share, and
St. John rambling at large with the rest of the party,
but more particularly beset by Miss Temple, whose
Christian name was Isabella, and whose Christian charity
had no bowels for broken hearts.

The most sociable individuals of the party for a while
were Nunu and Lash; the dog's recollections of the
past seeming, like those of wiser animals, more agreeable
than the present. The Cherokee astonished Mrs.
Ilfrington by an abandonment to joy and frolic which

she had never displayed before—sometimes fairly out-running
the dog at full speed, and sometimes sitting
down breathless upon a green bank, while the rude
creature overpowered her with his caresses. The
scene gave origin to a grave discussion between that
well-instructed lady and myself, upon the singular
force of childish association—the extraordinary intimacy
between the Indian and the trapper's dog being
explained satisfactorily (to her, at least) on that attractive
principle. Had she but seen Nunu spring
into the bosom of my friend half an hour before, she
might have added a material corollary to her proposition.
If the dog and the chief's daughter were not
old friends, the chief's daughter and St. John certainly
were.

As well as I could judge by the motions of two
people walking before me, St. John was advancing fast
in the favor and acquaintance of the graceful Georgian.
Her southern indolence was probably an apology in
Mrs. Ilfrington's eyes for leaning heavily on her companion's
arm; but, in a momentary halt, the capricious
beauty disembarrassed herself of the bright scarf that
had floated over her shoulders, and bound it playfully
around his waist. This was rather strong on a first
acquaintance, and Mrs. Ilfrington was of that opinion.

“Miss Temple!” said she, advancing to whisper a
reproof in the beauty's ear.

Before she had taken a second step, Nunu bounded
over the low hedge, followed by the dog, with whom
she had been chasing a butterfly, and springing upon
St. John with eyes that flashed fire, she tore the scarf
into shreds, and stood trembling and pale, with her feet
on the silken fragments.

“Madam!” said St. John, advancing to Mrs. Ilfrington,
after casting on the Cherokee a look of surprise
and displeasure, “I should have told you before that
your pupil and myself are not new acquaintances. Her
father is my friend. I have hunted with the tribe, and
have hitherto looked upon Nunu as a child. You will
believe me, I trust, when I say her conduct surprises
me, and I beg to assure you that any influence I may
have over her will be in accordance with your own
wishes exclusively.”

His tone was cold, and Nunu listened with fixed lips
and frowning eyes.

“Have you seen her before since her arrival?” asked
Mrs. Ilfrington.

“My dog brought me yesterday the first intelligence
that she was here: he returned from his morning ramble
with a string of wampum about his neck, which
had the mark of the tribe. He was her gift,” he added,
patting the head of the dog, and looking with a softened
expression at Nunu, who dropped her head upon
her bosom, and walked on in tears.

5. V.

The chain of the Green mountains, after a gallop of
some five hundred miles, from Canada to Connecticut,
suddenly pulls up on the shore of Long-island sound,
and stands rearing with a bristling mane of pine-trees,
three hundred feet in air, as if checked in mid career
by the sea. Standing on the brink of this bold precipice,
you have the bald face of the rock in a sheer perpendicular
below you; and, spreading away from the
broken masses at its feet, lies an emerald meadow, inlaid
with a crystal and rambling river, across which,
at a distance of a mile or two, rise the spires of the
university, from what else were a thick-serried wilderness
of elms. Back from the edge of the precipice
extends a wild forest of hemlock and fir, ploughed on
its northern side by a mountain-torrent, whose bed of
marl, dry and overhung with trees in the summer, serve
as a path and a guide from the plain to the summit. It
were a toilsome ascent but for that smooth and hard
pavement, and the impervious and green thatch of
pine tassels overhung.

Antiquity in America extends no farther back than
the days of Cromwell, and East Rock is traditionary
ground with us—for there harbored the regicides
Whalley and Goffe, and many a breath-hushing tale
is told of them over the smouldering log-fires of Connecticut.
Not to rob the historian, I pass on to say
that this cavernous path to the mountain-top was the
resort in the holyday summer afternoons of most of the
poetical and otherwise well-disposed gentlemen sophomores,
and, on the day of which I speak, of Mrs. Ilfrington
and her seven-and-twenty lovely scholars. The
kind mistress ascended with the assistance of my arm,
and St. John drew stoutly between Miss Temple and
a fat young lady with an incipient asthma. Nunu had
not been seen since the first cluster of hanging flowers
had hidden her from our sight, as she bounded
upward.

The hour or two of slanting sunshine, poured in
upon the summit of the precipice from the west, had
been sufficient to induce a fine and silken moss to
show its fibres and small blossoms above the carpet of
pine-tassels; and emerging from the brown shadow of
the wood, you stood on a verdant platform, the foliage
of sighing trees overhead, a fairies' velvet beneath you,
and a view below that you may as well (if you would
not die in your ignorance) make a voyage over the
water to see.

We found Nunu lying thoughtfully near the brink
of the precipice, and gazing off over the waters of the
sound, as if she watched the coming or going of a
friend under the white sails that spotted its bosom.
We recovered our breath in silence, I alone, perhaps,
of that considerable company gazing with admiration
at the lithe and unconscious figure of grace lying in
the attitude of the Grecian Hermaphrodite on the brow
of the rock before us. Her eyes were moist and motionless
with abstraction, her lips just perceptibly
curved in an expression of mingled pride and sorrow,
her small hand buried and clinched in the moss, and
her left foot and ankle, models of spirited symmetry, escaped
carelessly from her dress, the high instep strained
back as if recovering from a leap, with the tense control
of emotion.

The game of the coquettish Georgian was well
played. With a true woman's pique, she had redoubled
her attentions to my friend from the moment
that she found it gave pain to another of her sex; and
St. John, like most men, seemed not unwilling to see
a new altar kindled to his vanity, though a heart he
had already won was stifling with the incense. Miss
Temple was very lovely. Her skin, of that teint of
opaque and patrican white which is found oftenest in
Asian latitudes, was just perceptibly warmed toward
the centre of the cheek with a glow like sunshine
through the thick white petal of a magnolia; her eyes
were hazel, with those inky lashes which enhance the
expression a thousand-fold, either of passion or melancholy;
her teeth were like strips from the lily's
heart; and she was clever, captivating, graceful, and a
thorough coquette. St. John was mysterious, romantic-looking,
superior, and, just now, the only victim in
the way. He admired, as all men do, those qualities
which, to her own sex, rendered the fair Isabella unamiable;
and yielded himself, as all men will, a satisfied
prey to enchantments of which he knew the
springs were the pique and vanity of the enchantress.
How singular it is that the highest and best qualities
of the female heart are those with which men are the
least captivated!

A rib of the mountain formed a natural seat a little
back from the pitch of the precipice, and here sat Miss
Temple, triumphant in drawing all eyes upon herself
and her tamed lion; her lap full of flowers, which he
had found time to gather on the way, and her white

hands employed in arranging a bouquet, of which the
destiny was yet a secret. Next to their own loves,
ladies like nothing on earth like mending or marring
the loves of others; and while the violets and already-drooping
wild flowers were coquettishly chosen or rejected
by those slender fingers, the sun might have
swung back to the east like a pendulum, and those
seven-and-twenty misses would have watched their
lovely schoolfellow the same. Nunu turned her head
slowly around at last, and silently looked on. St.
John lay at the feet of the Georgian, glancing from
the flowers to her face, and from her face to the flowers,
with an admiration not at all equivocal. Mrs.
Ilfrington sat apart, absorbed in finishing a sketch of
New-Haven; and I, interested painfully in watching
the emotions of the Cherokee, sat with my back to
the trunk of a hemlock—the only spectator who
comprehended the whole extent of the drama.

A wild rose was set in the heart of the bouquet at
last, a spear of riband-grass added to give it grace
and point, and nothing was wanting but a string. Reticules
were searched, pockets turned inside out, and
never a bit of riband to be found. The beauty was
in despair.

“Stay,” said St. John, springing to his feet.
“Lash! Lash!”

The dog came coursing in from the wood, and
crouched to his master's hand.

“Will a string of wampum do?” he asked, feeling
under the long hair on the dog's neck, and untying a
fine and variegated thread of many-colored beads,
worked exquisitely.

The dog growled, and Nunu sprang into the middle
of the circle with the fling of an adder, and seizing
the wampum as he handed it to her rival, called the
dog, and fastened it once more around his neck.

The ladies rose in alarm; the belle turned pale, and
clung to St. John's arm; the dog, with his hair bristling
upon his back, stood close to her feet in an attitude
of defiance; and the superb Indian, the peculiar
genius of her beauty developed by her indignation,
her nostrils expanded, and her eyes almost showering
fire in their flashes, stood before them like a young
Pythoness, ready to strike them dead with a regard.

St. John recovered from his astonishment after a
moment, and leaving the arm of Miss Temple, advanced
a step, and called to his dog.

The Cherokee patted the animal on his back, and
spoke to him in her own language; and, as St. John
still advanced, Nunu drew herself to her fullest height,
placed herself before the dog, who slunk growling
from his master, and said to him, as she folded her
arms, “The wampum is mine.”

St. John colored to the temples with shame.

“Lash!” he cried, stamping with his feet, and endeavoring
to fright him from his protectress.

The dog howled and crept away, half crouching
with fear, toward the precipice; and St. John shooting
suddenly past Nunu, seized him on the brink, and
held him down by the throat.

The next instant, a scream of horror from Mrs. Ilfrington,
followed by a terrific echo from every female
present, started the rude Kentuckian to his feet.

Clear over the abyss, hanging with one hand by an
ashen sapling, the point of her tiny foot just poising
on a projecting ledge of rock, swung the desperate
Cherokee, sustaining herself with perfect ease, but
with all the determination of her iron race collected
in calm concentration on her lips.

“Restore the wampum to his neck,” she cried, with
a voice that thrilled the very marrow with its subdued
fiereeness, “or my blood rest on your soul!”

St. John flung it toward the dog, and clasped his
hands in silent horror.

The Cherokee bore down the sapling till its slender
stem cracked with the tension, and rising lightly with
the rebound, alit like a feather upon the rock. The
subdued student sprang to her side; but with scorn
on her lip, and the flush of exertion already vanished
from her cheek, she called to the dog, and with rapid
strides took her way alone down the mountain.

6. VI.

Five years had elapsed. I had put to sea from the
sheltered river of boyhood—had encountered the
storms of a first entrance into life—had trimmed my
boat, shortened sail, and, with a sharp eye to windward,
was lying fairly on my course. Among others
from whom I had parted company was Paul St. John,
who had shaken hands with me at the university gate,
leaving me, after four years' intimacy, as much in
doubt as to his real character and history as the first
day we met. I had never heard him speak of either
father or mother, nor had he, to my knowledge, received
a letter from the day of his matriculation. He
passed his vacations at the university; he had studied
well, yet refused one of the highest college honors
offered him with his degree; he had shown many
good qualities, yet some unaccountable faults; and,
all in all, was an enigma to myself and the class. I
knew him, clever, accomplished, and conscious of
superiority; and my knowledge went no farther. The
coach was at the gate, and I was there to see him off;
and, after four years' constant association, I had not
an idea where he was going, or to what he was destined.
The driver blew his horn.

“God bless you, Slingsby!”

“God bless you, St. John ”

And so we parted.

It was five years from this time, I say, and, in the
bitter struggles of first manhood, I had almost forgotten
there was such a being in the world. Late in the
month of October, in 1829, I was on my way westward,
giving myself a vacation from the law. I embarked,
on a clear and delicious day, in the small
steamer which plies up and down the Caynga lake,
looking forward to a calm feast of scenery, and caring
little who were to be my fellow-passengers. As we
got out of the little harbor of Cayuga, I walked astern
for the first time, and saw the not very unusual sight
of a group of Indians standing motionless by the
wheel. They were chiefs, returning from a diplomatic
visit to Washington.

I sat down by the companion-ladder, and opened
soul and eye to the glorious scenery we were gliding
through. The first severe frost had come, and the
miraculous change had passed upon the leaves which
is known only in America. The blood-red sugar maple,
with a leaf brighter and more delicate than a Circassian
lip, stood here and there in the forest like the
Sultan's standard in a host—the solitary and far-seen
aristocrat of the wilderness; the birch, with its spirit-like
and amber leaves, ghosts of the departed summer,
turned out along the edges of the woods like a lining
of the palest gold; the broad sycamore and the fanlike
catalpa flaunted their saffron foliage in the sun,
spotted with gold like the wings of a lady-bird; the
kingly oak, with its summit shaken bare, still hid its
majestic trunk in a drapery of sumptuous dyes, like a
stricken monarch, gathering his robes of state about
him to die royally in his purple; the tall poplar, with
its minaret of silver leaves, stood blanched like a coward
in the dying forest, burthening every breeze with
its complainings; the hickory paled through its enduring
green; the bright berries of the mountain-ash
flushed with a more sanguine glory in the unobstructed
sun; the gaudy tulip-tree, the Sybarite of vegetation,
stripped of its golden cups, still drank the intoxicating
light of noonday in leaves than which the lip of an
Indian shell was never more delicately teinted; the
still deeper-dyed vines of the lavish wilderness, perishing

with the noble things whose summer they had
shared, outshone them in their decline, as woman in
her death is heavenlier than the being on whom in life
she leaned; and alone and unsympathizing in this
universal decay, outlaws from Nature, stood the fir
and the hemlock, their frowning and sombre heads
darker and less lovely than ever, in contrast with the
death-struck glory of their companions.

The dull colors of English autumnal foliage give
you no conception of this marvellous phenomenon.
The change here is gradual; in America it is the
work of a night—of a single frost!

Oh, to have seen the sun set on hills bright in the
still green and lingering summer, and to wake in the
morning to a spectacle like this!

It is as if a myriad of rainbows were laced through
the tree-tops—as if the sunsets of a summer—gold,
purple, and crimson—had been fused in the alembic
of the west, and poured back in a new deluge of light
and color over the wilderness. It is as if every leaf
in those countless trees had been painted to outflush
the tulip—as if, by some electric miracle, the dyes of
the earth's heart had struck upward, and her crystals
and ores, her sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies, had let
forth their imprisoned colors to mount through the
roots of the forest, and, like the angels that in olden
time entered the body of the dying, reanimate the perishing
leaves, and revel an hour in their bravery.

I was sitting by the companion-ladder, thinking to
what on earth these masses of foliage could be resembled,
when a dog sprang upon my knees, and, the
moment after, a hand was laid on my shoulder.

“St. John? Impossible!”

“Bodily!” answered my quondam classmate.

I looked at him with astonishment. The soigné
man of fashion I had once known was enveloped in a
kind of hunter's frock, loose and large, and girded to
his waist by a belt; his hat was exchanged for a cap
of rich otter skin; his pantaloons spread with a slovenly
carelessness over his feet; and, altogether, there
was that in his air which told me at a glance that he
had renounced the world. Lash had recovered his
leanness, and, after wagging out his joy, he crouched
between my feet, and lay looking into my face, as if
he was brooding over the more idle days in which we
had been acquainted.

“And where are you bound?” I asked, having answered
the same question for myself.

“Westward with the chiefs!”

“For how long?”

“The remainder of my life.”

I could not forbear an exclamation of surprise.

“You would wonder less,” said he, with an impatient
gesture, “if you knew more of me. And, by-the-way,”
he added with a smile, “I think I never
told you the first half of the story—my life up to the
time I met you.”

“It was not for want of a catechist,” I answered,
settling myself in an attitude of attention.

“No; and I was often tempted to gratify your curiosity:
but from the little intercourse I had had with
the world, I had adopted some precocious principles;
and one was, that a man's influence over others was
vulgarized and diminished by a knowledge of his
history.”

I smiled, and as the boat sped on her way over the
calm waters of the Cayuga, St. John went on leisurely
with a story which is scarce remarkable enough
for a repetition. He believed himself the natural son
of a western hunter, but only knew that he had passed
his early youth on the borders of civilization, between
whites and Indians, and that he had been more particularly
indebted for protection to the father of Nunu.
Mingled ambition and curiosity had led him eastward
while still a lad, and a year or two of a most vagabond
life in the different cities had taught him the caution
and bitterness for which he was so remarkable. A
fortunate experiment in lotteries supplied him with
the means of education, and, with singular application
in a youth of such wandering habits, he had applied
himself to study under a private master, fitted himself
for the university in half the usual time, and cultivated,
in addition, the literary taste which I have remarked
upon.

“This,” he said, smiling at my look of astonishment,
“brings me up to the time when we met. I
came to college at the age of eighteen, with a few
hundred dollars in my pocket, some pregnant experience
of the rough side of the world, great confidence
in myself, and distrust of others, and, I believe, a kind
of instinct of good manners, which made me ambitious
of shining in society. You were a witness to
my déb¢ut. Miss Temple was the first highly-educated
woman I had ever known, and you saw her
effect on me.”

“And since we parted?”

“Oh, since we parted my life has been vulgar
enough. I have ransacked civilized life to the bottom,
and found it a heap of unredeemed falsehoods.
I do not say it from common disappointment, for I
may say I succeeded in everything I undertook—”

“Except Miss Temple,” I said, interrupting, at the
hazard of wounding him.

“No; she was a coquette, and I pursued her till I
had my turn. You see me in my new character now.
But a month ago I was the Apollo of Saratoga, playing
my own game with Miss Temple. I left her for
a woman worth ten thousand of her—and here she
is.”

As Nunu came up the companion-way from the
cabin, I thought I had never seen breathing creature
so exquisitely lovely. With the exception of a pair
of brilliant moccasins on her feet, she was dressed in
the usual manner, but with the most absolute simplicity.
She had changed in those five years from
the child to the woman, and, with a round and well-developed
figure, additional height, and manners at
once gracious and dignified, she walked and looked
the chieftain's daughter. St. John took her hand,
and gazed on her with moisture in his eyes.

“That I could ever have put a creature like this,”
he said, “into comparison with the dolls of civilization!”

We parted at Buffalo; St. John with his wife and
the chiefs to pursue their way westward by Lake
Erie, and I to go moralizing on my way to Niagara.